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Basic ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, a network of multiple simple terminals connected to a large computer, Kurtz explained. "The development of Basic was a natural step in a whole progression of computer activities that began when I arrived at Dartmouth in 1956," he said. "The whole thrust was to try to make computing easier for people, particularly nonscience and nonengineering people."My first experience with computer programming was using basic on a TRS-80 computer at my Junior High School.
Around 1960 or so, Kurtz said, he and Kemeny realized that the only way to do that was to develop a time-sharing system that would be especially geared toward small student jobs rather than the "big research stuff."
"The idea was that a time-sharing system made it easy for students or anybody else to get to the computer," Kurtz said. "The user interface to the time-sharing system was very simple. Instead of using things like 'log in' and 'log out,' we used [simple English-language functions] like 'hello' and 'goodbye.'
"We needed a simple language, and that's how Basic got developed," he said. "The languages that were around in those days were just not suitable, so we had to develop one from scratch -- [though] it derived from the existing languages, there's no question about that -- and we also wanted a computing environment where people could use it without having to take a course."
I wish there was a way to notify google when their index is incorrect. I get hundreds of hits a day from google image searches for John Lennon (I'm the 4th result of searching for "john lennon".) But the picture they think is on my site is not on my site! And they link to the entire month of September, 2001 so the bandwidth is not inconsequential. Shouldn't I be able to ask their robots to check a particular result in such a case. Like, "hey google, you got this one wrong - you don't have to believe me, but send a robot to check it out."
Note to self: make sure you use the "one time" alarm and not the "daily" alarm when you set your cell phone to go off at 4:30 am.
Related query: does anyone have a clock anymore? I mean one not on your cellphone or computer?
This seems like a sensible compromise: serving google ads only when the referrer is a search engine.
Pashua "is a tool for creating simple, but native Aqua GUIs for Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Rexx and shell scripts as well as AppleScript." Neat. Very simple to use.
Also from the same people: exif untrasher for recovering pictures erased from a digital camera. Both for OS X. Both free.
New York Bloggers, Monday, May 3rd at the Apple Store.
Here is a Windows program to remove the DRM from iTunes Music Store purchases.
Gmail screenshots. This thing has some serious DHTML kung-foo. I heard it does autocomplete in the search field! How is that possible?
This is page is undergoing some redesign. I've removed all my links, but now there is a larger list that is a slightly edited export of my browser bookmarks on the links page.
In the past I would use the links on my page for much of my daily surfing, but the ability of Safari to simultaneously open all links in a bookmark folder as tabs has won me over. So my plan now is to build my bookmarks in Safari, and then export them to that links page whenever I make substantial changes. The present list is a first pass, and lots more sorting needs to be done.
The free program Safari Bookmark Exporter helps in converting to plain HTML.
MB and a lot of the building went down to D.C. for the march today. I'm feeling a bit guilty for not going, but I just couldn't handle the 4:30 am wake up call. Still, I'm with them in spirit to the degree this is possible. Hopefully more people will be like her than like me and the turn out will be substantial.